I just read an interesting post about Movable Type and plugins (specifically Workflow). In a nutshell, the argument is that Movable Type is a product - one which costs money - and having to buy add-ons to provide what is perceived as core functionality isn't a good thing. It's an interesting argument, and one that I can understand as a consumer.
Today I added two new categories - Epicurious and Hall of Shame.
The first category will contain entries containing some relation to food. This isn't necessarily to say there will be recipes, but there might be. There will also be information about restaurants we go to, or even just quips that have something to do with food.
The second category is more of a meta-category in that you aren't likely to find any one subject within. Rather, this is just a way to highlight a particular sort of entry from all of the other categories. What sort of entry, you may ask? Entries about things that just don't make sense to me. Injustices. Ridiculous laws. Bad customer service. Pretty much anything, just so long as you can point a finger at it.
During the process, I actually went through every one of my entries and updated the categorization of them. As I did this, I found five things along the way.
The first is that I had developed a habit of trying to fit each post into a single category. That no longer makes sense to me. Most every post will have more than one category, and many will have three or four. This should help you to better find things that interest you.
The next thing I noticed was that I've been writing a lot more lately. Prior to November of last year, each month took up perhaps 2 pages of archives (meaning less than 20 entries each). Since November, the average has been more like 4 pages (something less than 40 entries) and that's moving rapidly towards 5 paqes.
I don't know that this means a anything, but I did find it interesting. I also noticed that I've been writing a lot more in each entry. Many of the earlier entries were two paragraphs long or thereabouts - the last few months have seen many (including this one) that are much longer than that!
Then I noticed that I like to point out stuff that just seems wrong. The brand new Hall of Shame category already contains 47 entries or something like that, across pretty much every other category on the system. I guess that should tell us something.
Fourth, I found that my archive navigation needed work. I first duplicated the nagvigation bar at the bottom of the page, so that if you are scrolling through the archives, you won't have to jump back to the top to visit the next page.
I've also updated this navigation a bit, so that instead of seeing only three pages (and two arrows), you will now see as many as seven pages (again with arrows as necessary). This means that you will see a list of possible pages for navigation that is often much closer to all of the available pages, rather than just a tiny subset of them. This in turn should speed navigation through any archive by allowing faster access to any given page.
I'd also like to integrate some next category/previous category navigation, but I haven't figured out how I'd like to do that just yet. It definitely would have helped to have links directly to the next and prior months (perhaps categories as well), so I'm going to figure out how to best integrate those.
Finally, I decided that I really like dynamic publishing. I think I'm going to convert my individual archives to use dynamic publishing as well.
